We all look for clues in the environment as to why we feel, why we feel the way we do. And we all listen to our bodies consciously or unconsciously.

But then healthy people move on and they emote, they feel.

Narcissists, psychopaths, and borderlines don’t move on. They’re in a permanent state, a permanent state of a puzzle, putting the jigsaw puzzles together. They are stuck at the initial phase of analyzing cognitions, thinking about it, listening to their bodies, collecting or gathering cues and information from the environment.

And this for them is prepared to immobilize. It’s a perpetual enterprise, never ending enterprise leads nowhere, results in nothing identifiable as emotion or affect.

They are like, you know, do you remember the old records when you put the needle and the needle got stuck? They are that stuck needle. The record goes on and on and on. You keep listening to the same music. You’re never going to get to the end of the song. You’re never going to get to the point of the song. You’re never going to listen to 90% of the lyrics because the needle is stuck.

In cluster B patients cope with these horrible deficits in emotional cognizance, in several dysfunctional ways. It’s functional because their personality disordered. The personalities are very low levels of organization. They don’t have the tools. They don’t have the instruments. They don’t have the capacity. They don’t have the presence of mind to reason, to foresee consequences, to control their impulses. They don’t have all this critical machinery. They are very infantile. They’re very two-state. They’re very primitive. They’re very binary.

And so they cope with these deficits by either repressing or avoiding the emotions. So the narcissist, the primary psychopath, they would simply not experience emotions. Sometimes they would experience something, something, and it would bother them that they don’t know what it is because they are control freaks, of course, narcissists and primary psychopaths.

It’s all about control. They want to control the environment. They want to control other people.

Because they perceive the world as hostile. It’s either control or be dead.

So they need to control. The world is out to get them. Everyone is an enemy per secretary in paranoid ideation. And so they need to control.

And if they feel something and they don’t know what it is, they feel out of control. So they need to label this something.

So very often you would hear the narcissist tell you, I love you. What he’s doing, he’s mislabeling his dependence on you, for narcissistic supply. Or you would hear the psychopath saying, I’m very happy. Actually, it’s probably not happiness, but it’s goal attainment. He finally got there. He achieved his goal.

Primary psychopaths and narcissists actually don’t experience emotions. They accept negative emotions. They experience anger or rage. They experience envy. Envy is a criterion, diagnostic criterion in the DSM-4 for narcissistic personalities.

So some emotions get through. And these are the emotions that allow them to lord over other people, to control other people, to subjugate other people and to convert them into slaves or sources of supply, or to cajole other people, charm other people.

These emotions get through. But even then, these are not real emotions.

For example, the narcissist is never angry. He rages. The psychopath is never really emotionally invested in any project or any endeavor or any activity. Anyone who had sex with a psychopath can tell you this.

Psychopath is not really into the sex. So they’re not there.

These are people who are defined not by their existence, but by their absence. These are disorders of absence, not of existence. So they don’t experience emotions.

And when negative emotions break through, the protective veil break through the false self.

In the case of the narcissist, or break through the feigned indifference and defiance of the psychopath, when these emotions break through, they’re malignant. They’re cancerous. They’re unrecognizable to a healthy person.

How can you compare anger to narcissistic rage? It’s like the emotion is metastasized somehow.

The second mechanism that people with cluster B use when they are faced with their inability to grasp what’s happening inside them, to label it, to judge it properly, to recognize it, to tell the world what’s going on.

When they realize this deficit, so the first thing they do, they repress or avoid if they are narcissist or primary psychopath.

Second thing they do, they misjudge the intensity or the semiotics of the emotion.

In other words, they misjudge the signaling of the emotion, the cue that the emotion gives them, the information contained in the emotion.

So a histrionic, for example, is likely to misjudge the nature of the relationship, how deep it is, how long-lasting, how involved the parties are.

This is so true that misjudging the intensity of romantic emotions is one of the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-IV for histrionic personality disorder.

They are totally clueless, totally clueless. They misread everything, social cues, sexual cues, virtue signaling, proper signaling, information of all kinds, environmental, sexual, interperson.

This is their way of avoiding the painful realization that they are divorced from themselves, that they have no access to themselves, that their emotions are artifacts way beyond their reach.

And so instead of admitting to this, what they do, they construct their own dictionary, their own vocabulary, their own private language, which no one else frankly understands, and they impose it, they impose it on other people, they impose it on the environment.

After one day, if you date a histrionic, after one day, you are the love of her life.

And on the second day, she wants to marry you. It’s her way of asking herself, what am I feeling? What are my emotions with this guy?

Oh, probably I’m in love with him. Probably I’m in love with him. Looks like he stands to reason, stands to reason that I’m in love. Makes sense that I’m in love with him.

Well, if I’m in love with him, why wait? Let’s get married.

This is radicalization and escalation, which I could call it even semantic escalation, escalation of meanings.

And the third mechanism is dissociation, dissociating the emotions. If you can’t join them, beat them. If you can’t understand your emotions, if you can’t label them, if you can’t judge them, if you can’t recognize them, if you cannot communicate them to others, why have them at all? Dissociate them, cut them off, scissor them away, like so many coupons in an ancient newspaper. Just pretend they’re not there. Pretend they’re not there.

And this happens with borderline personality disorder in the secondary cycle.

The borderline, which today we think is female secondary psychology, borderline, essentially what she does, she leverages, she uses several very important defense mechanisms, which survive from childhood, infantile defense mechanisms, in order to dissociate her emotions.

Dissociation is a diagnostic criterion of borderline personality disorder, because a borderline dissociates on multiple levels. And in every conceivable way, she depersonalizes. A borderline would tell you, I felt that I was on autopilot. I felt it wasn’t me. I felt I was observing myself from the outside.

She derealizes. She can say I felt I was in a movie. I felt the whole thing was unreal. Or she has dissociative amnesia. She will insist that she can’t remember what had happened, what she had done. She will attribute it to drink. I drank too much, so I had a blackout. I mean, she would dissociate.

And while dissociating the emotions, she makes use of her objecting constancy. It’s very difficult to forget your emotions if you have no objecting constancy. Out of sight, out of mind. You are married. You have a spouse. You go out. He no longer exists because out of sight, out of mind.

And so then it’s easy to do all kinds of things, to misbehave. Because he no longer is. And because he no longer is, there are no emotions attendant on him. And no emotions attendant on the misconduct.

In other words, there’s no emotional reactivity when you can forget the trigger. If you cheat on your husband as a borderline woman, and it’s much easier to do if your husband is out of sight, out of mind, and you have no emotions connected to the act.

So dissociating emotions is a major defense against mislabeling, against this alienation, this estrangement between the cluster B personality disordered patient and his own emotional processes.

Coping strategies in all these, literally all these personality disorders, disorders in coping strategies involve self-soothing. And self-soothing is dysfunctional.

Vast majority of self-soothing techniques or strategies are actually dysfunctional. They’re self-defeating. They’re self-destructive. They’re self-trashing. They’re reckless.

Overeating is self-soothing. Getting drunk is self-soothing. Promiscuous sex is self-soothing. Pathological gambling is self-soothing. All kinds of bodily behaviors which are harmful, most of them are connected to self-soothing. You can self-soothe with men. You can self-soothe with sex. You can self-soothe with dream. Anything and everything can be self-soothing.

And most self-soothing has an addictive or at the very least conditioned element. You do it almost automatically, almost reflexively when you are under stress or traumatized or in pain.

Reckless behaviors are also self-soothing.

And all the personality disorder, narcissist, borderline, sacrifice, when they’re faced with their emotional invalidity, with the fact that their emotional triples, with their disability, and it’s not only a disability to emote, it’s not only a disability to experience the emotion, it’s even a disability to tell yourself and others what it is that you’re feeling.

When they’re faced with this enormous limitation, with this loss, horrendous loss of 80% of what’s beautiful in existence, in human existence, they’re not stupid.

Many narcissists and psychopaths are actually super intelligent, Cleckley claims that most psychopaths are more intelligent than usual.

So these are intelligent people and they know what they are missing. They know intellectually, they know rationally, they don’t know in the heart, but they know in the mind, in the brain, what they’re missing. They know they’re missing out on everything that’s beautiful, everything that makes people human, everything that they’re missing out on the most profound experiences.

There’s nothing more profound than emotions, falling in love. Is there anything that comes close to it?

They know they’re missing on all this. They know they’ve been deprived, they feel a sense, a deep sense of injustice or in resentment, which is the heart and the engine that drives, for example, the psychopaths, antisocial defined activities, acts, is angry.

Narcissists is angry, the borderline is angry at themselves to start with, but somehow in the world for having made them like this, they try to blame their parents, try to blame society.

They’re looking for a scapegoat, they don’t know, they’re thrashing about, they don’t know how to, but, and so they try to self soothe, very dysfunctionally and destructively.

And many of them, especially when they grow older, and self soothing no longer works, or the cost of self soothing and become such that even they understood, got it through the thick skulls that, you know, enough with this, enough with this promiscuity, enough with this drinking, enough with this drug abuse, substance abuse, etc.

So then they switch from self soothing to repetition compulsions. It’s kind of, hope springs eternal.

They try again, and again, and again, and every time they fail, they withdraw, they isolate, they avoid.

So there’s this approach avoidance, repetition compulsions, older narcissists, borderline psychopaths, and histrionic, let’s say about the age of 30 or 35.

Their approach avoidance. They try to provoke in themselves, some emotions, and to do it in a controlled, restricted, restrained, constrained way so that they can be sure what emotions they are provoking and evoking, since they cannot label emotions, they cannot recognize emotions, they need to experience emotions, they need to provoke in themselves emotions in controlled environments.

So if they want to experience love, they would select a partner home in on the partner that explains behaviors such as love bombing and grooming, these are controlled behaviors, they these behaviors emanate from the need to control, not only the partner, it’s a common mistake online.

The love bombing and grooming has somewhat to do with the partner is a lot to do with the narcissists and psychopaths.

Because love bombing and grooming are controlled tactics. And above all, they need to control their internal environment so that when there is an emotional reaction, when they do experience emotions, they will know what this emotion is.

Why? Because they narrow the protocol, they limited the space, they control the micromanage, the interaction.

And gradually, as approach fails, and is followed by avoidance, and then another approach followed by more avoidance and withdrawal. It takes more and more courage, more and more depleted energy, more and more effort to approach again.

There is hurt aversion and pain aversion, even in psychopaths and narcissists and borderlines, especially borderlines, but even in narcissists and psychopaths, histrionics, not to mention borderlines and codependence.

Borderlines are driven by hurt aversion or pain aversion. So it’s very painful to approach and avoid approach and withdraw, approach and lose, approach and be betrayed. It’s very painful.

And so gradually, narcissists and psychopaths, they develop persecutory introjected objects. In other words, they gradually form paranoid delusions, persecutory delusions centered around introjects, in other words, centered around internalized objects.

So their initial approach to other people would be very, very cautious, wary, suspicious, and they would immediately transform these other people. Take a snapshot, internalize a snapshot, as an internal object in order to control the object, because as a snapshot, you’re in total control.

But then gradually, as the real person deviates and diverges from the snapshot, they will begin to feel that the meaningful other, the significant other, the intimate partner is frustrating them intentionally and malevolently and maliciously, they would convert the intimate partner into a persecretary, introjected object.

And this would be the topic of our next video.

So I’ll tell you what you’re feeling now. You’re feeling tired and bored and you want to dislike this video, but you can’t, because you don’t want any bad blood between you and me. Trust me on that. Just kidding.